The same thing happens to the Earth as weight is shifted from one area to the other. If the weight of a top is moved around, the spinning top would start to lean and wobble as its rotational axis changes. The Earth spins around an axis kind of like a top, explains Vincent Humphrey, a climate scientist at the University of Zurich who was not involved in this research. "The faster ice melting under global warming was the most likely cause of the directional change of the polar drift in the 1990s," said Shanshan Deng, a doctoral student at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and lead author of the new study. Melting glaciers redistributed enough water to cause the direction of polar wander to turn and accelerate eastward during the mid-1990s, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, AGU's journal for high-impact, short-format reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences.
The way water is distributed on Earth's surface is one factor that drives the drift. The axis Earth spins around-or more specifically the surface that invisible line emerges from-is always moving due to processes scientists don't completely understand. The locations of the North and South poles aren't static, unchanging spots on our planet. Glacial melting due to global warming is likely the cause of a shift in the movement of the poles that occurred in the 1990s.
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